By: Elie Ashery, RegReady
One of the most successful ways to generate leads and expand reach is through content marketing. We spoke with Elie Ashery, managing principle of RegReady, about how to monetize content marketing and a brand new way of looking at co-registration. What we uncovered were cost-effective secrets to generating leads, developing trust, and increasing engagement. Online marketing has changed dramatically recently by becoming more content centric. What are some of the challenges marketers now face?
New investments in content marketing are transforming the business models of marketing departments into ones more representative of publishers. The three most prominent challenges that have emerged with content-centric marketing are purchasing lags, fringe audiences, and the lack of lead volume. However, just as with publishers, these challenges can be solved with simple economics to create better business model efficiencies.
Developing content can be expensive and hard to monetize. How can marketers maximize their content investment?
Even though there are ways for content marketing to be effective, part of the investment often goes unmonetized when it fails to generate quick purchases or highly qualified lead volume. Monetizing marketing content, if done thoughtfully, can help to maximize its value when less qualified or unready sales leads and impressions are exchanged for well-qualified ones. A co-registration community such as RegReady offers an efficient way to grow your marketing lists and sales leads by working with contextually relevant partners.
Does Co-Registration really work?
Very few successful brands can stand on their own without the help of ecosystems, partnerships, and affiliations, which are viewed as strengths in the eyes of customers. As a result, an objective of monetizing marketing content should be to include or find new brand-enhancing relationships. Co-registration efforts can be one of the most successful strategies. When applied prudently, co-registration is one of the most successful ways a marketer can generate leads or build an email list. Just look at how successful Expedia or Orbitz is at getting their visitors to book a hotel and rental car with their flight.
What should marketers look for in a co-registration partner?
It is extremely important to look for a community, not a network. In a community people know who everyone else is. There’s transparency between members of a community. Most importantly, members need to be able to pick their neighbors by deciding who they want to trade their leads with instead of letting an intermediary do it for them and leading to greater relevancy.
Why does this work so well?
Since not all traffic from marketing content, or the leads they generate, are qualified or sales ready for you, they are mostly likely qualified for partners, affiliates, and other brand enhancing relationships. Additionally, most qualified leads are usually not sales ready but could be sales ready for related products and services that help to reduce your product’s lag time to purchase.
What are other ways to monetizing marketing content?
To understand the benefits of monetizing marketing content, one doesn’t have to look further than typical co-marketing techniques such as conferences, joint webinars, and link sharing. Conferences and joint webinar is an example of content monetization that encourages the “sharing” of complimentary audiences. Aside from co-registration, other more efficient and subtle forms of content monetization include native advertising. Native advertising is where contextually relevant information such as articles, infographics, and videos from brand-enhancing partners are embedded into newsletters, blogs, etc. This increases the overall experience and value for prospects and customers.
What is the best way to build trust?
The best way to build 360-degree trust is by providing full transparency of lead sources with trading partners, as well as a clear identification of opt-in processes for customers and prospects. With marketing content monetization, marketers can earn the full value of their content, while maximizing qualified lead flow without denigrating their brand or marketing objectives.
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